“Language first came to fascinate me when I was 5 and heard a Jewish friend suddenly start speaking Hebrew with her parents … I was actually in tears at the idea that some people could talk in two ways and I could only talk in one.”
From an editors’ note in the April 8, 2012 issue of The New York Times Book Review about the reviewer/linguist/teacher/author John McWhorter (quoting him on the basis of a life that now includes speaking fluency in three languges, reading fluency in another five, past fluency in one — “then there’s the rain forest creole language of Suriname that I studied for my PhD” — and oh, yes, English).